I started the blog Bureaucracy for Breakfast in 2010, and it was a comedic look at unemployment, the economic divide, and the lifestyles of the 1%. It was featured on Marketplace on NPR, AOL News, Huffington Post, and Chelsea Handler’s Borderline Amazing Comedy. I have been interviewed by ABC 20/20 for a segment about the Rich Kids of Instagram, and in addition to writing about Hollywood, celebrity, and excess for Forbes I write about pop culture and entertainment for The Hairpin, Ask Men, Salon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Studio System News. My first book, BROKENOMICS, is coming from Seal Press spring 2015. You can find me on Twitter @TheElf26.

'Frances Ha': Sometimes The Best Career Isn't The One You Imagined

I got the chance to see Noah Baumbach’s new movie Frances Ha a few weeks back and, along with Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, it’s my favorite film so far this year. Both stories have beautifully imperfect, awkward women at the center. Women who can be selfish one minute, and loving the next; you know – real women.

Greta Gerwig, who is a little like Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn rolled into one, plays Frances, a twenty-seven year old aspiring modern dancer in Brooklyn. She lives with her best friend Sophie, never has enough money (hello, 21st century), and always seems to be humiliating herself. She’s lovable, and it’s painful to watch life beat her back at every turn. Don’t worry though, it’s not all doom and gloom. Frances Ha is a comedy and most of the time you’re laughing with the main character, even when she stumbles. I won’t give away the whole story, but you know those people who get struck by lightning multiple times during the course of their life? That’s Frances, but the blows come from her relationships and career.

What’s interesting about the character’s journey is that it’s not a triumphant Working Girl trajectory where the put-upon secretary eventually gets to kick up her heels in her corner office at the end. It’s a movie about accepting things as they are, rather than making yourself miserable trying to attain a dream that might not be right for you. It sounds defeatist, but it’s anything but in this situation.

Frances wants to be a modern dancer, but it’s clear to everyone but her that she’s pretty mediocre. She looks like she’s slouching through the motions in her dance class, and the only time she really shines as a dancer is during a great sequence where she’s leaping and twirling through the streets of New York to David Bowie’s song Modern Love (a nod to the French film Mauvais Sang). She’s a stand-in at her dance company, and when her boss very passive-aggressively lays her off, Frances bristles at her suggestion that she try something different, something she might have a real talent for, like choreography.

It’s never wise to give up on your dreams and throw in the towel when things get tough (and in the arts they are always tough), but it is wise to open your mind about what the best career path for you might be. If you’re too bullheaded and unmovable about the way your path should go, you might make yourself miserable and miss out on a detour that could land you somewhere much more interesting. That doesn’t mean you should meander all over the place without a plan waiting for success to rain down on you, but one of the great things about Frances Ha is that it’s saying: It’s OK that your life and career aren’t picture perfect. Maybe the picture is just different than you imagined.

It would be so easy for this film to be about a character who settles, or, like most feel-good Hollywood flicks, a Rom-Com about a girl who suffers a few pratfalls but winds up standing tall in the end with the man and career of her dreams as Florence and the Machine’s Dog Days Are Over swells in the background. Instead, it’s about a twenty-seven year old woman who finally lets go, and accepts the fact that the best use of her talent might not be center stage, but behind the scenes. And that’s more than OK – in this case, it’s triumphant.

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